“We want Instagram to be a place where you can share all of your moments, to create a pressure-free space to do so,” Kevin Weil, head of product at Instagram, told The New York Times. The live video feature allows users to notify their followers when they go live and pin comments, or shut off comments completely, while recording. The direct message aspect of the app has been updated to include an option to privately send photos and videos that disappear from the recipients's inbox after they've been seen.

Instagram, which was acquired by Facebook in 2012, has been consistently releasing new features to compete with Snapchat in the past year such as Instagram Stories. The live video and disappearing picture and video features were rolled out globally today.